A professor once told me, "If you take a man from 500 B.C. and put him in a modern environment, he will eventually adapt to his new surroundings. However, if you took a man from the present and sent him to 500 B.C., he would not be able to cope".
Whether you agree with my professor's opinion or not, the concept in never the less interesting when discussing the internet's impact on our society. What this image ultimately states is that while we, as humans, have an innate ability to adapt and learn, we have a harder time working with the obsolete techniques of the past. Take the show "Survivor" for instance, hundreds of years ago the arduous tasks the castaways face every week (such as making fire, creating shelter, or scavenging for food) would have been common knowledge to almost any one. Yet as man became more and more advanced we slowly forgot and left behind the antiquated skills of our ancestors.
Does this mean that as the internet changes the way we access information we are becoming less intelligent? Perhaps in one sense, most of us probably would not fare too well faced with the lifestyle of a cave man, but in another sense mankind has never been as knowledgeable as it is now. If the internet is causing a negative effect on our society it is our work ethic that is waning, not our intelligence.
Sixty years ago, if you wanted to know about a specific point in history, you would have to go through books, manually scanning each page to find the desired information. Not all it takes is typing what you want to know in Google and hitting enter. Both will lead to an adequate answer, but the work needed to use the internet is substantially less then manually looking through a book. Ultimately, the internet has impacted us as much as the calculator did, the answer comes twice as fast with half the work.
Mankind is advancing each day, and as our world changes how we interact with it must change as well. It may seem like a disadvantage to lose sight of the more work intensive ways of the past, but the internet has given us an almost limitless portal to information, news, entertainment, and even other people. If used correctly and seen as a tool for advancement and learning it can teach us more then the cavemen could even comprehend.
What we may have lost in the advantages of constant hard work to find information, we have gained the key to the biggest library in the world, and not only that, our library grows and interacts. As we adapt, so does the internet.
